Scoops
Beautiful, non-intrusive on-site surveys
My startup failed. I went back to job searching daily, and was getting 40% response rates from my reachouts to hiring managers.
I was getting a million job alert emails (half of which weren't even relevant) and I'd STILL find new postings that would slip between the cracks.
So now I spend 2hrs+ searching everyday, combing 40+ job boards, social media feeds, and more - I thought maybe I'd also help some other folks keep an eye out for their perfect remote job.
Anyway if anyone's interested in getting ONE email alert for ALL new postings (and only the ones that actually fit you, curated by hand) you can check it out here for $5/mth. For a few $ extra I also find the hiring manager and their contact info for you to try and land it.
If you find a posting that I missed, you get a month free. I'm quite confident I catch everything because I was a hiring manager myself so I know where companies post things and under what conditions they post where.
Just got my article published on Indie Hackers! Guest blogging is a hell of a lot of fun and I think people underestimate how much knowledge they actually have. I always feel that since I never went through formal UX training I'm a bit of an imposter.
Writing on my experience though helped me become a product design lead for a Series A startup, with an article that got 30K+ views on Medium (and is now published here on IH!).
Check it out here: https://www.indiehackers.com/article/two-fundamental-approaches-to-designing-ux-4bfc958abd
Made a huge pivot! We're now building the sexiest website surveys ever. Would love landing page feedback from anyone who has a SaaS tool or is looking to get feedback from their users.
- Hyperlocal - it attaches to events you can specify so you can ask right as someone performs an action
- Looks and feels amazing
- Easy to implement and doesn't require development after setup!
#landing-page-feedback
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First impression is positive, but then I get a little bit "uneasy" with how that serif font looks like in the CTA button and the poll options on the right.
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I agree with @chrisblackwell, it does look amazing!
You might benefit from changing your call to action from "Sign up for updates" to something that offers some sort of value to people. Create a pdf guide to why on site forms are useful, give away early access, etc. When people hear "Sign up for updates" they are probably thinking it's just going to clutter their inbox.
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Good point. Will change.. Thanks for the heads up!
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Get some antialiasing on those fonts!
Fix your favicon.
Looks good though, very smart and modern.
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You were doing something before where you would have people answer any question right? I think I used that! small world.
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@noahwbragg yup.. couldn't make enough money doing it. Have a few more months of runway so going to try this and apply to YC.
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I really like this idea. Good Luck! How did you come up with this?
PS: If you're ditching stop guessing... maybe something along the lines of Be in the know or something that ties in with the "Scoop" theme.
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@nashtheory I was a product designer before this and just hated on-site surveys. So I thought maybe there was a way maybe I could actually design a survey experience people didn't hate :). Good idea re: the tagline. How about "Get Answers"?
Btw, going to send you an email, Undock looks really neat!
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First of all, the product looks amazing. I'm very interested and excited about your launch!
The landing page looks pretty nice. The colour scheme is fantastic. Everything is well spaced out and flows nicely.
I would change the tagline "Stop guessing". Nothing about that tells what your product is about. On sites like Product Hunt, many people open 5 - 6 tabs at a time, and just stay on the pages that look interesting. So you have to grab them right away.
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Yea "stop guessing" comes off negative too. Will change. Thanks a lot @chrisblackwell! Let me know if I can return the favor somehow (I can give you feedback on your product too)
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I accidentally emailed a list of our customers without putting them in the BCC field. As you can imagine, that was a massive violation of privacy with the appropriate backlash.
Sometimes I think we need to stop working so that when we do work we're focused and not sloppy. Hopefully none of you make the same mistake!
All I can do now is profusely apologize and promise it won't happen again. Still feels terrible, worked so hard to make the customers happy only to antagonize everyone in one fell swoop.
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I once emailed 333,000 people "Hi {{ first_name}}". You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube but it sounds like you are reflecting and seeking to improve in the future. What more can your customers ask for at this point?
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It happens. We have all done it. I wrote up a little checklist of what I go through before I send emails.
https://medium.com/@joshdance/email-send-checklist-4f24bc119553
What else would you check?
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Stuff happens Chris
Apologizing to customers and users is good..
Perhaps you can think of a small gift to give your users as a way of showing your gratitude and appreciation .
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All make mistakes. We are not robots. Same happens even with big corporations with a lot of staff working on every small project. I think most of the clients should understand and let it go. Others you probably don't need
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Great advice! Thanks man.
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oh man I can't even imagine how you felt after you realised of what happened.. I'm sorry that happened to you. No worries though this is only a bump in the road and a valuable lesson that you'll definitely always pay close attention to. You know, better now than much later when the stakes are much higher :)
And yes I agree with the need for rest, as I sometimes tell myself that I'd rather keep working than take a break, when in fact 1 hour of work after good rest can be worth 5 hours of work when exhausted. -
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As someone else hinted at now would probably be a great time to implement a tool that prevents future you (who is nearly as stupid as past you) from making that mistake again :)
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Hi @Chkrlee! I'm curious to know what tool do you use to send emails? This should never happen with online services like Mailchimp, Sendinblue, etc.
Thanks and good luck!
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Sorry @Chkrlee, that's no fun.
Mistakes happen, just learn from them so they don't happen again. Most people understand that, as long as you apologize they won't think twice about it.
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That’s not a giant mistake. Giant mistakes are existential. This one isn’t. You’re going to be fine.
Just reached 100 paying customers (total). Our customers are startup founders, designers, & researchers, so it may not sound like a lot.. but we went through hell to get here and so I think it's important to pat yourself on the back every now and then :)
Now to find more founders who need to conduct research..
https://scoops.io/
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awww yeeeah! a little emailing mistake ain't sh*t when you're blasting through the market like this :)
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How are you guys different from other consumer panels such as Surveymonkey panel, Peoplefish etc. Price?
How do you ensure the respondents are 'real'?
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Hi! We actually have a self-policing system. Researchers regularly upvote and flag respondents who are being extra helpful, and extra unhelpful - this helps weed out poor respondents.
On top of this, our belief is that if we treat respondents well, they'll give better data. That means we tell them who you are, what you're working on, and present it to them like a chat that they can use to message you like a conversation. What this does is make them actually care about helping you - 65% of our respondents have left non-incentivized comments, and you can read testimonials from respondents who have said they like doing it just to help folks out.
Finally - we let you create a dialogue with them - you can follow-up and chat, and even interview them! SurveyMonkey, Pollfish's respondents don't care enough to stick around.
Hope that helps!
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Cool. I have tried both surveymonkey and pollfish and they tend to be less transparent with their respondents. Hopefully you guys are able to scale while being able to provide the same service to both respondents and your paying clients.
All the best and hopefully i'll use it when I have something on my mind!
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congrats @Chkrlee that's a large milestone, celebrate!
also: very nice website 👍 -
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Congrats! Great idea, it deserves to be doing so well.
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Thanks! We're still only making $800/mth so it's not enough to live on.. but it's a start. Now we've got 2 months to make $5k so we can survive..
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Super super impressive! Congrats!
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Hey! :)
Awesome milestone!
And great idea too! -
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Congrats!! Keep the hustle on.
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This looks impressive. I was looking for the exact same thing.
Wondering, how do you get people to answer questions ?
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We've got a separate web app for that at https://club.scoops.io/! Our approach with the respondents is very different from our competitors. Our goal is to help respondents care by telling them who the researcher is & what they're working on. It's paying off - 65% of our respondents have left non-incentivized comments!
There's nothing more skewing for your data than people who don't actually want to help. That's what we're here to solve and that's what our customers love about us.
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I love what you guys are building and I just submitted my first question. Looking forward to seeing the results.
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Awesome work!
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Looks great! Congrats
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Congrats!
Wonder how you actually do your survey? Using some service or manually?
Another question is how you managed to set up a blog at your domain? I remember some moment Medium stopped allowing using their engine for blogs.
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Hi there! If you log out and click the "respondents" tab on our landing page, you can actually see how we gather them :) You can sign up to be a respondent yourself if you wish!
Re: Blog, I believe you can still do it..? We set it up only a few months ago but we had to pay their $75 one time fee. I don't believe Medium stopped allowing custom domains for publications, but I could be mistaken
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Thanks!
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This comment was deleted 7 years ago
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we want to make it affordable :) We just also want to make it economical for us. userinterviews.com charges $55 for an interview so we're already cheaper than they are! Thanks, let me know if you have any issues or feedback creating questions!
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This comment was deleted 7 years ago
I've been advertising on Twitter, with a 4% CTR (I'd say that's decently high). But every time I drive lots of traffic to my site, very few if any hit the "Get Started" CTA. We're talking like %5-10. Not even signup, just hitting the signup CTA.
I'm wondering if there's something grievously wrong about my landing page that I'm just not seeing. It's a product to help other makers validate their ideas/graphics/assumptions about the market.
Please help! Any feedback is really appreciated :) https://scoops.io/
#landing-page-feedback
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Hey @Chkrlee,
Here's some candid feedback.
There's too much info and it's disconnected. It's hard to figure out what the core value is.
In the hero, the message is about knowing your customers by doing customer research.
In the "How it Works" section, you're talking about finding early adopters and gaining traction.
I know those things are related, but the current copy isn't connecting everything.
The design elements in the hero are distracting. The text "No problem by they way..." looks too much like the rest of the copy. Adding the arrow, I thought I was supposed to click on it. It also looks like it's part of the Intercom integration.
In the hero, you may be pushing people away from your site by linking them off to your Medium post on "Why Research could Make or Break your Business". Have you checked the stats on how many people are clicking that link?
Your tone in that article is how I think you should approach your landing page.
Your current headline - "Make things people want" requires a lot of explanation to get people engaged. Currently it's nice and short but it doesn't connect with the customer.
Put your customer into their emotional experience.
Using your article (and the assumption that customer research is the goal) try something like this:
"Scratching your head because you can't figure out why you aren't getting new customers?"
Imagine your customer sitting at their monitor and seeing that they have no new customers, yet again. What are they going to do? Are they going to slump down in their chair because they still have no new customers? Are they going to heavy sigh and say "what the f#$k"?
Paint that picture and make that connection as soon as you can.
The "How it Works" section is well designed but it's still just a lot to consume. Pare it back a bit.
The following 1 & 2 sections came out of nowhere. Nothing set up a bulleted list. That section feels like somebody liked it and really just wanted to use it, somewhere.
The "Peek Inside" section could easily replace the previous two sections with a little bit of messaging.
Finally, your CTA's are inconsistent. You have "Get Started For Free" and "Create a Question for Free".
I think it's a lot of information that needs some cohesion and paring back.
The design is nice and the service is necessary. If you haven't already, use something like Hotjar to watch how people interact with your site. Check how many people are clicking off to your linked Medium article.
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Can you tell if they're even scrolling down? How long are they staying on the page? Or they just land and bounce?
Also, allot a few % (or maybe more) to click fraud. Unfortunately, that's the reality of our times.
Re: Landing page, not an expert but some comments
- The left and right border images on your header seem distracting.
- On How it Works section, those light gray text are too light, almost invisible. Also, I didn't realize they're even clickable!
- Overall, I think it's too much text displayed. (Even though some of the text are just part of the graphics.)
Maybe on the graphics, just represent these text as colored bars?
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Nope, most not even scrolling down. It's on twitter though.. wouldn't they have ways to prevent ad fraud? Thanks for the feedback though much appreciated!
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Click fraud can come from either competitors or publishers.
From competitors: They cause you to quickly exhaust your daily budget, preventing legitimate users from seeing your ad. They click on your ad with no intention of buying, just driving up your cost.
From publishers: They display the ads on their site, have an army of bots/real users clicking on ads displayed on their own network so they get the commission.
I have no experience with Twitter Ads though. But with FB and Google, these kind of activities can be rampant. I think Google ads are the worst when it comes to click fraud.
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Hi Chris, you should look into integrating FullStory.com on your website (I have no affiliation with them). I've integrated it on my bootstrap project at Yumfog.com They have a free tier which lets you see users interacting with your website. You might be able to get some clues on what's wrong.
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Already done :) I was wondering about ad fraud specifically because 95% of people don't scroll down at all or take any action on the page!
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As others have suggested, there's a lot of text there. That's especially true for a landing page to an ad. And even more so if the ad is from something like Twitter and not a search ad.
So instead of linking the ads to your actual site, I would try simply presenting one key value prop on a traditional landing page. So no elements or other items to distract from the pitch.
Have a clear CTA that is repeated on the page. (Side note: your page has buttons that are styled like your CTA buttons, but which aren't really buttons. "Interview a Respondent" for example. That's confusing.)
I would make the text + value + CTA on the landing page correspond with the CTA in the ad. I would also try variants of the CTAs on the landing page. Is "get started for free" the best CTA for this traffic? How does it perform versus e.g. "get real people to validate your idea" or something?
I would also consider a lighter-weight CTA like getting their email in exchange for something they can use right now.
The other thing I would look at is whether the traffic sources/CTAs are bringing you the right traffic. If you get the wrong traffic, it won't convert at this stage or a later stage in any case. So make sure you're attracting the right audience!
Good luck!
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It's not clear to me how the interviewees are being matched to my survey. Am I bringing them? Are you finding the right people for me?
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I'm sourcing them for you, but yes that's not clear. Will change!
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That's a totally different reaction from me than if I'm bringing my own people. That big change is enough to turn me from, "I'd never use this," to, "I'll give this a shot."
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:) Great to hear. I've got my marketing work cut out for me, clearly. If you do give it a shot let me know, you can get started for free (1 question to 50 people) if you're looking just to get your feet wet!
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Hey Chris, could you share some screenshots of your ad(s)? A bit hard to give any advice without seeing the ads.
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This is something I've been experiencing with my product. The only difference is I'm using Adword :(
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Share your landing page and ad copy if you want us to take a look. May help to specify your targeting settings too.
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My first impressions without seeing how you set up your ads:
- I'm having a hard time figuring out who the audience would be for this tool - what do they do, how much disposable income do they have, why are they having trouble saving? Are you asking people to deposit money into a stranger's account, pay fees (to stripe, and to you), and then be able to withdraw their own cash? I don't want to be rude, but who would use this type of service? Perhaps you know of use cases I can't think of, but if I had to guess why nobody is signing up it would be because there's no product market fit. This aside, let me point out anything else that sticks out.
- Not clear this is for UK only
- Not sure what this tool does, the message just doesn't come across clearly. It sounds like you lock up your own funds so you don't spend them?
- Pain not stressed, who is this for? Why do they really need this?
- It sounds like you want me to send money to an account - this is an INSANE ask that would require an insane amount of trust. I had a problem trusting TransferWise and they are backed by a billionaire... Why should anyone trust your website / your company? Do you employ bank grade security? Who is backing you? How many people are behind your organization, will my money disappear? I mean.. who the hell are you? I don't say this in a rude way, just making a point that you are asking for something so big and giving me so little to go on.
- Again, fees seem insane - stripe fee, your 1% fee, plus some amount, just so I can lock away some money for savings?!
- zero trust - no testimonials, no backers / investor info, no social proof of any kind, no about, no company name, no contact info, no phone number, you are a ghost.
I will stop here. I think you see the pattern and where I am going with this. For a website that deals with money, you're going to have to 10x the trust factor. See any of the online banking apps, money transfer services.
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Hi,
Thanks for the feedback.- My target audience is people who have hard time-saving money. The tools are there to help you save money.
- I'm starting from UK but I hope to expand to other currency.
- Yes, that's correct. What part confuses you? Perhaps this is the issue.
- For people who want to save money fast to fulfill a goal.
- Ah OK, I agree here. Someone who is just starting would definitely to do something.
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And ad copy / targetting preferences/ audiences?
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Someone else I saw was lamenting in the comments that there's no way MVPs can be built in days. I believe it's true for some products (hard to test whether people will really want electric vehicles in 3 days) but for a lot it's possible, and I'm living proof.
Steps:
- Created a Ship page on Product Hunt
- Created a Typeform
- Attached Stripe to the Typeform
- Attached the Typeform to the Ship page, asking whoever was interested to fill out the Typeform and pay.
- Promoted the Ship page via Product Hunt's internal $80/mth service and also some ads
- People got to the Ship page, asked their survey questions, then paid.
**for context, my product is a consumer research service where you can for $12 ask 100 people a question and follow-up and even interview based on how they answered. The original MVP is still here but I removed the Typeform link: https://www.producthunt.com/upcoming/scoops-3
I've now built out the product, hitting $800/mth. https://scoops.io/ It's possible!
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Minimum Viable Promise?
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I feel like I should learn what typeform and product hunt is. I had no idea stripe was so fast to set up though, that's really good to know!
edit - also, congrats!
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Nice! Is there a link to this so we can see it in action?
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This comment was deleted 5 years ago
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Designed it myself :)
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I'm using a custom domain on Medium as my company blog, but I really want to start building my SEO so I'd like to take that in house.
What solutions do you guys use for in-house company blogs?
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https://ghost.org/ - works for us. it's free, pretty cool, and here a lot of options for SEO and customization.
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Self-Hosted WordPress. It is not as cool as using a new shiny tool but when it comes to blogging and SEO, t is difficult to beat WordPress in my opinion. Get a $5/Month VPS, setup WordPress on it, don't use bloated or badly managed plugins and you should be good for the most part. If managing a VPS scares you, you could look into managed WP Hosting.
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There are things that can be used as blogging solutions without servers (Jekyll & Hyde, Gatsby...). You can simply use these frameworks and they turn markdown into HTML so you can basically just customize how it looks and BOOM, you have a serverless blog. Do a little S3 sync action and your blog is online for a low price.
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Do you have access to any developers? A Gatsby [https://www.gatsbyjs.org/] website powered by Contentful or any of the other CMS it supports can be great. It requires some dev work to set up but you can get a super performant and fast blog that non-developers can add to if set up correctly.
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If I redid my own behind the scenes blog now, I'd look into some of those headless blogging systems. They provide an interface for writing content, but they don't provide a way to show it.
Actually rendering the content on a website is easy, if you can just pull the Markdown from somewhere. So I just created my own blog with Python and that was easy too, but what wasn't easy was making it nice and secure enough that I'd feel comfortable letting part-time content writers use it directly.
For that using a headless CMS to give a nice writing interface might be a good option. It's also tricky to have a good interface for uploading images, not sure how those headless ones handle that.
But I def. wouldn't just use Medium. Been burned before, had some successful blog posts on Posterous and now they're just gone without even an option to redirect the traffic anywhere.
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I'm curious about this, you mean the medium publication left and you lost the blogs? I'm starting to write on Medium right now and thought applying to publications was a decent way to get new readers.
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Posterous was another popular blogging platform similar to Medium and well-known on Hacker News at the time, but they were unable to find a revenue model and shut down, taking all content with it.
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- Guest blogging on medium. write an article, find a good publication (active readerbase), ask them to become a writer, then submit the article to their publication with a tag on the bottom to "visit my site". (don't laugh, this has generated 1000+ pageviews for https://scoops.io/ btw, with over $400 in revenue generated).
- Writing on Indie Hacker :)
- Going to my customer's websites, offering feedback through their customer support channel, ask that if they found it useful to send a message (my value proposition) to folks in the company who may benefit from it.
- Offering discounts and perks to clubs, newsletters, online programs, in return for putting us in their list of perks
Just thought I'd share! I'd love to know what you guys also do (so maybe I can get some more ideas...)
I kept looking for distribution channels with a lot of eyeballs - product hunt, forums, newsletters, etc.
But in the beginning anyway, since the product/service isn't well known sometimes people need to be handheld.
I've found a ton of success going to different product sites (my product, Scoops, helps startups conduct consumer research to validate ideas & gain traction) and leaving them feedback in their support channels.
Then when they respond I offer more feedback via my service, Scoops! This has actually been surprisingly effective. Quality over quantity I suppose. Sometimes it's not about how many eyeballs you can get but rather the quality of the eyeballs that matters (for conversion anyway).
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Hey Chris, I wasn't sure what was going to happen with my contract a couple months ago so I popped into the market and found the same issue. Tons of spam all over the place without a good way to filter through it to find the good jobs. I'd love to get your opinion on it and talk to you more about the job market in general.
https://alcamine.com/
Wow, you may just have erased the need for my mvp! I just took a remote job myself so I think I may shelve the production for now - if there's anything I can help with let me know.
Congrats on the new gig! I'll shoot you an email.
Congrats Chris for the launch!
You could use Secret for your MVP to use some SaaS for free https://www.joinsecret.com
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Yes it is!
This comment was deleted 3 years ago
Great question! Ultimately we DID build something people wanted. The problem was the economics of the business. How would we scale to different segments